Students missing exams due to travel?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

After not teaching for a while, I am teaching three courses this semester. In each of the courses I have had at least one student email mid semester to inform me that they will miss an exam due to travel. In three of these cases, the students asked if they could take the exam earlier or later than the scheduled date.

Is this normal behavior now?? And how do I preemptively discourage these kinds of requests - is more specific syllabus language enough (if it works at all)? I would like to hear of others' experiences and strategies.

I've experienced this too, and I don't know of any good way to preemptively prevent it aside from building policies against it into the course syllabus. Yet, despite this, I still get these kinds of requests. It does seem to me to be increasingly common behavior from students.

What do readers think? Any tips for the OP?

Comments

[Assistant Professor]

This has been going on for a while - it happened to me ten years ago when students wanted to miss an exam in my class due to recreational travel organized by a student organization. I was annoyed at the time! I did end up offering an alternative date prior to the original exam date.

I'll say that in the decade since then, I've rethought many of my prior beliefs regarding deadlines and accommodations. Students are people with lives that they need to learn how to balance and navigate against other obligations, and students are also people who sometimes have situations occur outside of their control. I am less inclined now to adjudicate good and bad reasons for student requests. I prefer to have policies in place that can reasonably address needs to miss class/deadlines/assignments/exams that enable the student to navigate these things transparently and largely puts it on them to do so.

[c'est la vie]

I have a policy stated in my syllabus (that I also repeat on the first day) that I only allow make-up exams in cases of emergency that are subject to my discretion, and that travel plans explicitly do NOT count as an emergency. I then say that if they have spring break plans, family reunion plans (etc.) that will cause them to miss a scheduled exam that they should drop the class or switch into another section with a different schedule.

Does this work? Not really, to be honest. They still end up walking all over me, but that may also be my fault for being a pushover. Being a young woman (with the associated student biases and expectations) who relies on student evals also certainly does not help here.

[southerner]

Universities usually have policies about what kind of absences merit rescheduling exams - these policies are in the student handbook. You can be more lenient, usually, but not less.

So I just say that unless it's an absence which falls under the university policy, I'm not rescheduling the exam.

[Bill V.]

Since the pandemic, I have completely changed my approach to student requests for exceptions, including for cases like the one OP describes. I have a "Life Happens" clause in my syllabus: A free one-week extension on any assignment without needing to ask. If someone needs another, they must provide a justification in advance.

Does it help student success? Not much. Does it hurt? Also no. But I'd rather give an opportunity to succeed to a student who needs it than be a barrier to success for any of them. Many students are profusely grateful, which tells me they genuinely needed it.

We often say we are being strict about deadlines/exams because that is what students will face "in the real world." But there are approximately zero high-stakes real world (i.e., let's be clear, employment related) events that have to happen within a three-hour window on a specific day decided months in advance without mutual consultation. In the real world, people do reschedule meetings, due dates for projects, etc., including scheduling around vacations. It is mostly no big deal.

Forcing students to choose between travel (which they probably didn't organize, might be the last family trip of their lives, might be a peak human experience, etc.) and school seems misguided. It forces them to lose on something important.

In the case of exams, if you are concerned the student will get or give questions to friends, there are various mitigation strategies. Once you have taught a class a few times you (should) have a bank of questions to draw from so that the student will not have the same questions as everyone else. If you don't have that bank, this is an opportunity to build it; it is not wasted effort since you'll have them for later, too. Another option is to give them another assignment, one where they do they work instead of you having to come up with extra questions (an essay, project, presentation, etc.). Maybe have them help lead the test review session, so that they have to know the material before the trip.

We regularly make exceptions like this for student athletes who travel to compete. That shows that it isn't impossible or impractical.

[Elizabeth]

The current crop of students is inculcated with the "it doesn't hurt to ask" mentality. They will ask for all sorts of things and hope for the best -- new exam dates, random grade bumps, extensions, etc. My approach is to tell them in advance that I don't do any of these things without the university's approval so deal with them. Then I don't answer emails asking.

[Anonymous AP]

Replyint to Bill V:

This is all admirable adn you make good points about the real world being more flexible, etc. I do not think an alternative project is fair. I always did significantly worse on exams than I did on projects/essays. I know I would have been annoyed to find out that other students didn't have to take the exams because of discretionary travel. So I think if some students are writing an exam, then all students must (barring extraordinary circumstances).

[Assistant Professor]

@ Bill V. - the "life happens" clause is a nice way to frame it (and I agree with Covid having reshaped fundamental norms/expectations in teaching - but also in jobs). I think a combo of pandemic + better understanding of disability literature + unpacking the "myth of meritocracy" + generally rethinking what is important about education has contributed to my thinking on flexibility and accommodations.

One question I have though is how to not create a system that is too burdensome on the instructor. It takes a lot of work to offer alternative exams/assignments/create new questions/grade on alternative timelines. Do you set up any parameters that help you balance the burdens on you of accommodations? I think one reason people don't offer flexibility to students (even if they don't name it as a reason) is it feeling really impractical for the instructor, especially when teaching lots of classes or high numbers of students. And balancing what is survivable for the instructor is important! We all likely already have more work to do than time to do it and need to find balance. Thanks for sharing any further lessons learned from your "life happens" clause implementation.

[Michaela]

I don't use tests, but one strategy I have recently adopted to deal with these issues in my large intro level class is to have a set number of "writing days" (my students write in-class essays) that looks like this. There are five of those writing days throughout the semester. Students are only allowed to complete four of them. They can skip whichever fifth one they prefer. And, their lowest grade on those four is dropped. So if they get all As on the first three, they can simply not complete anymore. The benefit of these policies combined is that students can miss two out of five "test" days for... whatever reason they want or need. I don't have to communicate with them about it and nor do my TFs, which reduces unnecessary email, office hours, etc. It's obviously better for them to only miss one, but if they miss two, they are not screwed.

Also, in unusual circumstances, I have let students complete all five and dropped the two lowest grades (in both cases I allowed this, students joined the course very late and so basically missed the lead up to the first one, but wanted to get a chance to practice philosophical writing and get some feedback). So it helps for flexibility this way too, and I don't think that is particularly unfair to other students, so long as there is a good reason for it.

This really cut down on dealing with student excuses etc. and just going back and forth with them and organizing alternative options--but I think it did so in a humane way that acknowledges that life is messy and stuff happens. I plan to continue it and I think it could be adapted for exams in various ways.

[Michaela]

Also, at the beginning of the semester I really emphasized how much flexibility there was built into the policy for them but how much I was not going to make exceptions for people, given that flexibility. I think I ended up making one single exception (for an extremely good reason that I can't actually remember), but that is far, far less (in a class of either 80 or 100) than the kind of back and forth and dealing with this stuff with students that I have done in the past.

[Bill V.]

Replying to Anonymous AP and Assistant Professor:

I share the concern about fairness, and my impulse would be that if I were to offer an alternative to an exam, it would be harder/more time consuming than studying for and taking the exam. I structure my courses with many assignments so that no single assignment dominates the grade, and this also mitigates the imbalance mentioned.

Instructor burden is of course important to consider. With large classes and many requests for exceptions, I would set one alternative exam date, and have the university's make-up testing center proctor it.

I've known instructors of very large classes (e.g., Psych 101 with a thousand students) who recognize the inevitability of these make-up exams and who therefore schedule them as part of the syllabus. Then it is less disruptive, and the "extra" work can be mostly taken care of before the course begins. TAs can handle the administrative tasks for their discussion sections.

Another point is to be strategic about the timing of your exams: If there is a period when many students are more likely to request exceptions (before or after spring break or Thanksgiving, for example), don't schedule assignments in those periods.

I personally don't think it is much trouble to come up with alternative exam questions, and grading takes about the same amount of time per exam no matter when you do it. I guess it depends on the subject and the kind of exam. But for short answer/essay answer tests like I would expect in most philosophy classes, philosophy is so big that alternative questions seem easy to come up with. YMMV. But at least after you have done it once, you will have an alternative set of questions you can use the next time you teach the class.

A strategy I have occasionally used but didn't mention above addresses both replies to some extent: If the class is one with a mid-term exam or several tests and a cumulative final exam, I have allowed a student to miss a test/mid-term exam and then counted the grade on the relevant section of the final exam as substituting for that missed test grade as well. (Was that clear? Let's say there are three tests, and a cumulative final. Student misses Test 2. The grade student gets for Test 2 is the grade they get on Section 2 of the final exam.) This is actually a penalty for the student, though they might not realize it, since they are missing the opportunity to check their knowledge on that material before the final exam. This is the least burdensome on the instructor, too.

FWIW, I would almost never grant an exception during the official exam week (except for documented illness, compassionate reasons, or other serious issues). Check your university's policies on that sort of thing.

[Anonymous AP]

Thanks Bill V for the clarification. In your post I think I see the reason for your flexibility as opposed to others'. My university doesn't offer proctoring for make ups except for disabled students who write all of their exams separately anyway--so if there is to be a make up exam, it is up to me to proctor it. I have had situations where I have had to offer 3, 4, and even 5 make up opportunities, including well past the end of term. That detail also brings me to the second difference which is that in classes where I do have TAs, their contract ends at the end of the term. So any additional work remaining after the fact is completely on me.